Reclaiming lost links and mentions that never linked

Reclamation only recovers what you already earned, which is both why it is worth doing and where its ceiling sits. Across the profiles I have worked on, six to fourteen per cent of referring domains carry a link that no longer resolves: a 404 target, a URL changed in a redesign, a migration whose redirect map covered the top hundred pages and nothing else. Realistic recovery is twenty to thirty-five per cent of those broken links and eight to fifteen per cent of unlinked mentions. Anyone quoting you more than that has either not counted yet or is counting links they intend to build. The same person reads the logs and writes the emails. I have run this after three post-merger consolidations where several brands were folded into one domain, and the pattern repeats: the acquiring company knows what it redirected and has no idea what it stranded. Half the work involves emailing nobody: The first deliverable is a redirect list, not an outreach plan. A broken inbound link usually points at a URL whose routing you still control, so the fix is a 301 your developer deploys in an afternoon, with no publisher in the loop and no reply to wait for. That list comes first, before any outreach, because it is the cheapest recovery available and because it changes what is left to ask for. Its best source is your own access logs, 404s with referrers, which almost nobody exports and which surface links no backlink index has crawled. Ahrefs, Majestic and Search Console's crawl statistics fill the gaps, and the Wayback Machine reconstructs the URL inventory you had before the migration that caused this. Who gets asked, and by whom: Outreach is usually done badly because it is treated as a volume exercise. I send fewer emails than you are expecting. A page gets one when there is a reason the recipient would want the fix: their article cites a study whose link is dead, their round-up sends readers to an error page, their readers are being told a product that still exists no longer does. The message goes to the person who can change the page, the named author if they are still there, the section editor if they are not, the Redaktion address in German trade press, which is read, rather than the info box, which is not. I write and send under my own name and copy you on every thread. When the mention is one you may not want: Some unlinked mentions sit inside coverage a company would rather leave alone: a critical review, a piece about an outage, a comparison that puts you second. The link still carries value and still sends readers, but that is your decision and not mine, so those are flagged in a separate tab with the passage quoted and nothing is sent until you say so. I also will not email a journalist you are in dispute with, which is why I ask for that list before starting. How the result is counted: A link counts when it is live and crawlable thirty days after it appears, verified by a crawl you can rerun with the configuration I hand over. Nofollow is recorded as nofollow. Redirect fixes are counted separately from outreach recoveries, because one is work you deployed and the other is work somebody agreed to do. The sheet shows every attempt, every reply and every silence, so the ratio between effort and result stays visible to you rather than summarised by me. Outside the scope: Paid placements, sponsored posts, guest articles, expired domain purchases, and any arrangement where money moves for a link. Building links from other people's broken pages, which is link building wearing this service's coat. Digital PR and story pitching. Content production of any kind. Deploying the redirects, though your developer receives the exact rules. Not the right service if: Nobody writes about you yet. Reclamation is arithmetic performed on existing coverage, and where the coverage does not exist the honest answer is to spend the budget on public relations first. I will say that in the first week and stop rather than manufacture a campaign. Skip it as well if your site has never migrated, never rebranded and never deleted a URL, because there is probably nothing broken to reclaim, and you should hear that before you buy rather than after.